As is known in the art, many processor chip vendors provide hardware simulators so that software developers can begin debugging the software prior to running the software on the processor hardware. The simulator enables a user to obtain detailed information during the execution of the software.
Known software debugger systems typically enable a user to set a breakpoint to stop program execution at a defined event. Various data and state information can be displayed to enable a user to debug the program. Conventional debuggers support the setting of a breakpoint on a single processor.
Some known simulators operate to simulate a system having multiple processing engines. An application may include multiple processing engines running similar, if not identical, images, which share common source code. During debugging, it is sometimes necessary to set a breakpoint on the same line of common code in all or some of the processing engines that share that code. In know systems the breakpoint is set in each processing engine individually. This requires manually identifying the processing engines that contain images built using the source file of interest and then locating the assembled or compiled location of the desired source line in each of those processing engines. This process can be quite tedious and error-prone.